The Evolution of Tech Hiring

May and June were big months for Crossover’s international hiring tour. May brought five more tournaments, including our first events in Hungary and Belarus. With June came some exciting new developments: our first-ever completely online hiring tournament, plus in-person events in Romania and Poland that coincided with some of Eastern Europe’s biggest tech conferences.

In June, Crossover attended Techsylvania in Cluj and Devoxx Poland in Kraków as an event sponsor. We scheduled tournaments for the weekends following both conferences and invited local tech professionals we met to sign up for our one-day hiring events.

First online tournament breaks attendance records

Crossover is now approaching the sixth month of our event-based hiring initiative, and we continue to learn from each tournament and evolve our strategy. In mid-June, we hosted a pilot online tournament for QA engineers that proved to be a successful expansion of our lineup of local hiring events.

Sinan Ata, Crossover’s country general manager for Turkey, organized the ambitious experiment and hosted the event over a webinar platform. Job-seekers clearly liked the idea, as nearly 1,000 candidates registered. Just under 350 of those attended the tournament — a number that’s more than six times the average number of participants (around 50) we get at a typical tournament. It’s also more than double the attendance of our largest local tournament to date, which attracted about 160 participants in Cairo, Egypt.

“Working with us, [tournament winners] are going to work with new technologies such as full-stack Docker/Amazon technologies, not to mention the high-level technical challenges that are waiting for them. We have also adapted a work-from-anywhere model, where we are only asking for a productive workweek, and they are responsible for managing their time accordingly.”

Inside the competition

Here’s what some of the participants at our May and June tournaments had to say about the process:

“I spent a good time here, not because of the weather [the Kiev tournament was held on a sunny day at a venue with waterfront views] but because of the opportunity to measure [my skills], to compare my experience and my knowledge to other colleagues.”

– Marek

“It was a great event. I actually came to test myself — there were really hard questions in regards to technical knowledge and product management. But after the entire day, it turned out that I won, so I am really happy, and I invite everyone to the next events.”

– Lukasz

Check out the videos below for an insider’s look at our tournaments in Kiev and Sopot: